Tez had a message waiting for me courtesy of Tru, who it turned out had been more concerned by the prospect of internal meltdowns than my unexpected disappearance. It took several explanations before I realised the seer had informed him I could go jump in a hole. No doubt Tez was laughing about it somewhere. I resolved to pay him back eventually.

It was the kind of joke the old Tez would have made, yet somehow didn’t quite land. I wasn’t sure how I felt about his new incarnation, and I didn’t think Tez was, either. This version was darker and less predictable, and not in a fun way. I figured he was busy trying to reconcile how much of the old to keep with the blank slate of a new identity, which was a problem I couldn’t relate to.

And what about Mayari? I followed up, eying the goddess in question as she peered past me to the temple’s entrance, spear firmly in hand. How about her exit?

He didn’t say, my housemate replied. I’ll ask, but it might be a while before he responds.

Mayari turned back and I gave her the ‘so-so’ hand signal. Her lips set in a firm line.

If he doesn’t, I’ll ask him myself, I said. He’s due a visit, and I want to know what he’s planning.

Five minutes later, I shot out of the nearest gap between roots in the altar tunnel, my dragonfly wings buffeted by air and wind currents. A torrent of sludge poured after me, marking the position of the otherwise invisible opening for a few extra seconds as Mayari released the pressure on the other side.

The threads of the pact informed me I was back on Earth, re-establishing themselves in a spiderweb of tangles, high above an endless expanse of faint blue ocean. Cloudless sky hung above me. It wasn’t hard to imagine what it might have been like for Mayari’s dad back in the beginning. Alone, with no place to rest. Blues so ubiquitous they felt like the only real colour.

For a good half minute I let myself fall, before warping through to the sky above Mayari’s island to catch myself properly, else the beach arrest my momentum for me.

Tez was waiting in the clifftop garden, hacienda arches rising majestically behind him. He looked haggard; worse than I’d ever seen him. The whites of his eyes were shot with blood, and the skin underneath them was somehow pulling off limp and puffy simultaneously. He had his latest hat pulled low over his eyes, providing shelter from the sun just beginning to rise over the back of the building. As a god of night, it wouldn’t make his job any easier.

“I’m not coming with you,” he said, before I could utter a word.

“Well, hello to you, too. You look like a drowned rat.”

Lucy’s portal from the evening before was nowhere to be seen, although the remnants of soggy food still scattered the grass, along with the broken table.

“You should be in Rome,” Tez growled, looking for all the world like an educational rapper might burst into being in front of him in a shower of wiggly triangles to use him as an example of what happened on drugs. “Every second you spend here is one I could be using to improve our chances.”

There were various arguments I could have responded with. How he wasn’t doing anyone any favours by draining all his stamina before the battle even started. How he could at least have been using the mirror in Bolivia, or what remained of it. I had to assume he’d heard it all already in some other timeline. “You’re right,” I said instead. “I hope it’s worth it.”

“It will be. We’re in position. You’re not.”

I noticed he didn’t meet my eyes, and the niggling at the back of my mind intensified. “We need a better way of contacting you until at least one of you meets up with Regina,” I said, pointedly not making my departure. “Look at what happened to Mayari. You can get her out, right?”

“I’m working on it. Listen, my reflection is prodding Vishnu as we speak. Once you leave, I’m headed back to friendlier timezones to monitor events from a distance.”

“How long till shit hits the fan?”

“Not counting time freezes? About half an hour.” He held up a hand before I could open my mouth. “You’re wrong, by the way. I’m fully committed. It doesn’t matter that it was my predecessor’s obligation. If anything, waiting too long was his mistake.”

“You did kill two million people.”

“You of all people should understand.”

So that was how it was. No matter how long I lived, I couldn’t outrun the reputation. Even with Tez, who should have known better. “Fine. For the record, Legba won’t know what hit him, with or without your help. But I’d better hear from you in thirty minutes.”

“Oh, you will.”

On that ominous note, I took my leave.

I didn’t head straight to Rome, but doubled back to Tru’s American penthouse. The one-time terrible rap artist was putting his rhythm to better use through anxious foot-tapping and doing a better job of the latter. His hand appeared to be mid-transit to his mouth. My arrival apparently startled him enough to fumble the pakora in his fingers, though he caught the snack well before it hit the carpet. The demonic reflexes were working.

Durga, a striking warrior goddess – both aesthetic and literal – and Tru’s assigned partner for the day’s crimes, had made it back before me, which I mainly realised from the coffee table piled with partially-eaten assorted Indian delicacies. The warrior herself was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean much. Unlike the majority of our compact group of turbulent deities, Durga hadn’t spent the past few centuries confined to mortal limitations – or pretending to be. She was less out of touch than most in her position. But it still showed.

Rather than salvage the dignity of his food, Tru placed it back on the table with the rest and brushed off the crumbs on his suit leg. “Is it time?”

In response, I shifted into my best Ares impression. The shape was tall, fit and muscular, as one would expect from someone who spent most of their time charging around waving heavy weapons. Neither it nor the scraggly beard paired well with its accompanying business suit, lending me the unfortunate appearance of a successful gangster on court day rather than someone who had risen through the ranks by putting in actual effort.

Which made it perfect for Ares.

The Greek god of war had been defeated before I’d taken my first baby steps. Back when my life had boiled down to an interminable series of doomed Helpdesk tickets, Lucifer had run an ongoing statistical analysis on cross-pantheon staff departures, segmented by discipline. The war gods hadn’t fared so well. Not that you’d have known it from a first glance. A seventy-percent attrition rate still left a lot of gods when the starting figures had been high to begin with. But they bled the fastest. Dead or demoted, punished or self-inflicted; they were brawlers in a world where solutions had evolved beyond poking things with a stick.

Or not just a stick. I’d left ours with Mayari and Gia, after all.

There were several people in Providence who knew what Ares had looked like, but only one I could safely bribe. Eris had taken one look at me in my guise as Odin, broken out into uproarious laughter, and demanded official management of Floor E.

I’d crowned her then and there.

Eris’ depowered lack of telepathy was an inconvenience, but her art was more than coherent enough to make up the difference, if you ignored the fact it was drawn in nail polish. It also looked a lot like one of the faces in Hera’s diamond pool.

The most striking features of my current ensemble were the eyes. The red irises could be explained as business-inappropriate contact lenses. The tiny flame effects dancing inside them, less so. Then again, everything I’d heard about Ares seemed to confirm him as the kind of goon who’d wear sunglasses indoors, so all the better.

“How do I look?” I asked Tru, pushing said glasses up the bridge of my nose.

“Terrifying.”

“Good. Any other answer, I’d have killed you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Hmm. My delivery needed more work. “Approach, peon,” I growled, cupping my hand and bending one finger inwards towards me in a suitably menacing manner. “It’s time for you to cut your teeth on your first taste of merciless corporate savagery. And you, Durga.”

I didn’t notice the goddess appear per se, but she was there nonetheless in bright red and gold, poised on the edge of the sofa opposite Tru as if she’d been there all along. She might have been. I could never tell when it came to her. Three of her arms rested casually on the sofa, with the fourth holding another pakora.

One detail differed from the last time we’d met. A small blue jewel adorned the centre of her forehead, half-sunk into the bone and sparkling as it caught the artificial light. I didn’t ask how she’d done it. That she had told me she didn’t expect to set foot back in the office. Too many questions.

A plain repurposed dagger rested in Durga’s lap, shimmering in pale iridescent green. She flipped it around her fingers, and it vanished from view. “It’s about time,” she said with a grin. “Let’s slice off some pecuniary zeroes.”

We touched down in front of a flank of tall, spotless windows and vertigo to put Tru’s apartment to shame. Expected characteristics, given it was the highest serviceable floor of the tallest building in Philadelphia. The actual highest being the obligatory local lookout for tourists fond of squinting and pointing at distant objects.

It was a nice office, albeit schizophrenic. Half was brown, austere and full of maps that looked like the secret love children of pirates and air traffic controllers. The other half had taken its design tips from the evil corporation handbook, outfitted with stainless steel shelving and carefully-displayed drones on plinths with little plaques on them.

[V3 GigaFly,] my eyes picked out on the nearest. [Black box model.]

“This’ll do,” I said to Tru, who was still gaping out the window at the notably larger black box crushing a significant part of the city mere blocks away. Durga was already nowhere to be seen.

The demon lord managed to tear himself away from the view. “Is this the right place?”

“You’re about to find out.” I swept a hand around the office. “I like the decor. Very confused.”

A short laugh of disbelief greeted us from the far side of the room. A large desk straddled it, perfectly centred and custom-made so that each half matched the side of the room it was on; warm mahogany against cold steel. “I’m sorry,” a woman’s voice followed it up. “I’m not sure to what I owe the pleasure. I’m Grace Colstee, and I wasn’t expecting an appointment. We’re not even officially open for the day.”

I watched Tru’s eyes threaten to bug out of his head. If his reaction had been satisfying before, it had just gotten better. You didn’t tell me we’d be going after Colstee, he protested in my head.

There hadn’t been many viable candidates for the buyout of the decade. Only a handful of companies worldwide were rich enough to make a bid. Limiting them to viable timezones had slimmed the field further. But the final deciding factor had been notoriety.

Calling Recoy Media a household name was an understatement. Its CEO was better-known than I was. It had the kind of ambitious plans society couldn’t agree on whether they liked or not, and the kind Providence took a liking to for partnerships, right before they stole the technology. I was fairly sure they’d been in talks before. If we were going to draw Hera out of her upper management comfort zone, a splashy takeover could only be better.

I swaggered closer to the table, spreading my arms in Ares’ renowned unconcern. “Before you call in the bodyguards, allow me to be the first to congratulate you on the good news.”

The woman rose from her seat and dropped the mouse she’d been using, her cropped, dark hair exposing her neck around an otherwise high collar. Small earrings dangled from each of her lobes in the shape of tiny drones in silver or white gold. “Good news isn’t usually accompanied by an incursion into my private office. How did you get in here?”

I ignored the question. “What’s important,” I stressed the second word, “is that your company is about to acquire a large, formidable subsidiary with resources unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”

“Is this a threat? Or are you trying to bribe me? Either way, you’re not doing a good job. You clearly know who I am, but –”

I lowered my sunglasses.

Colstee stopped, squinted, then abandoned the pretence of subtlety and stepped around the corner of the desk. Tru backed up to make room for her as if the office wasn’t already spacious enough to fit a small private jet.

“Oh,” she said eventually, as her expression warred between naked ambition and disappointment. “You must be one of our honoured guests.” She sighed. “Allow me to wipe the security footage this time to save you the bother. Senior leadership is sick of thinking of excuses to explain spontaneous explosions in the building. Last time, shortages meant we had to call the fire department away from fumigating a tyre factory. A whole district suffered unprovable but strongly-correlated hallucinations. It’s hard for us to promote goodwill when the media makes us look like the bad guys.”

“Especially when you are the media,” I agreed, nodding along. “Keep the cameras running. This is a message. I want to make sure it’s received.”

“And I suppose we’re to be your mail service.” The multi-billionaire’s smile was trying too hard.

“Sender and receiver. You’ll find it’s a larger package than you’re used to.”

“I don’t believe we’ve been acquainted.”

“Ares. Mars, if you prefer. That’s my planet you’re planning on sending rockets to.”

“Is that what this is about? I thought we came to an agreement. People want advancement. If it’s about the price –”

I waved her aside, taking the shades off entirely and placing them in my breast pocket. “I couldn’t care less what you do with that hunk of space junk. I’m not here on behalf of Providence.”

The corner of Colstee’s mouth curled downwards, and her gaze moved from me to Tru. The demon had stuck his hands under his armpits in a valiant but transparent attempt to hide them shivering. Threatening one of the world’s richest people had a tendency to do that. “And you are?”

“The –” He hesitated, then adopted a much gruffer voice than usual and stuck his chin out at me. “He does the talking.”

“It’s not my preferred solution, either,” I lied. “Recoy will be buying out Providence in half an hour. They won’t take it well. So if you don’t want you and your building to end up like that –” I pointed to the latest cubic addition looming over the city skyline, "I suggest you join me in a little announcement. Make sure they know who’s responsible.”

Colstee went quiet for a long moment. Without a word, the hand made its way to her forehead instead as her eyes flicked back towards me. “A buyout. And you want me to tell them it was you?”

“Did I stutter? I can do this without a hostage, but it’s harder to manage a sudden acquisition without a leader. They’re planning something with this messiah business the world won’t shut up about. I think it’s time we reunited, in case things get out of hand.”

A trickle of sweat trailed its way from Colstee’s forehead to her cheek, betraying the fear she otherwise hid adeptly. Providence might have been scarier than Ares, but Providence wasn’t the one currently in front of her. I was leaving her with no way out, and she knew it.

She tried anyway. “They will. They’ll come after us both. My business specialises in information, Lord Ares. I’ve seen what they do, and they control everything. Did you know we cracked quantum data almost a decade ago? We were going to revolutionise communications. Instantaneous information transfer, regardless of distance. No signal required. Compared to current standards, it would have been as good as magic.” She glanced at me out of the side of her eye. “Providence shut it down.”

“And then stole it,” I guessed. It hadn’t been much longer after that that our company phones had gained the ability to make calls past interdimensional barriers.

“Exactly. So you can see we’re not friends. Surely my company can be of more use to you as a long-term partner than disposable ammunition. I have substantial resources I can put towards alternative goals for you.”

“Hmm,” I growled, scratching my chin. “No. Let me rephrase. If you don’t do it now, my colleague will slit your throat.”

“Hi,” Durga said in a neutral tone, emerging transitionlessly behind the media mogul. One hand rested on her hostage’s shoulder, as the other held cold steel to her throat.

Colstee jerked a little and stiffened, sending her earrings swinging with inertia. The muscles in her neck and jaw tensed.

I held out my hand towards Durga, palm up. “Phone.”

The device appeared in my palm a second later, switched on and unlocked. I sauntered over to the pair, opened the camera app, and rested my arm over the billionaire’s shoulder. Durga retracted the knife and stepped out of view as I hit record.

“Heyo, it’s your boy Ares here with my bestest friend whatsherface, and we’re going to blow your mind with what we’ve got in store for you today. Poor little thingamajig didn’t want to, but she came round, didn’t she?” I squeezed Colstee’s shoulders, hard enough to make her wince.

“I had nothing to do with this. Please send help.”

“So much friendship! Anyway, we wanted to be the first to share the happy news. Recoy is going to be a brand new parent! Such a precious little subsidiary. We’re thinking of calling it Providence. And because we’re all about goodwill, it coincidences with a healthy, bouncing boost to your very own bank balance; what’s a little ownership next to money, am I right? Anyhoo, let us know your thoughts and comments right here in Recoy private HQ. Love you, Mum.”

I put the recording out of its misery and tossed the phone back to Durga.

Colstee stumbled away, wiping her shoulders where I’d touched them. I couldn’t blame her. She stumbled back to her desk and sat down, putting her head in her hands.

For a few moments, no one said anything. Everything had gone to plan, but it didn’t feel like victory. Durga was no longer smiling, and Tru, still with his hands clamped under his armpits, looked nakedly horrified.

“Go,” the warrior ordered, her fingers wrapped around the phone. “We’ll keep an eye on this one, and send the video to Hera when it’s time.”

We shared a glance, and I wondered if I’d taken Ares’ persona too far. My eyes were drawn once again to the jewel on the goddess’ head.

“I’ll keep them safe,” Durga added. “All of them. I’m not going to fail. Go.”

Colstee’s confused face rising from her hands was the last thing I saw before I warped through into Rome.